Mystery of a missing yard sign

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, September 30, 2006

When we found the crudely fashioned noose stretched in front of our front door, in the heart of suburban Houston, that we realized that it was not politics as usual.

Until that Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, our front yard signs for the Democratic candidate running for the House of Representatives had only disappeared or been moved. Every morning became an adventure — where would our sign be today, what would the visiting police officer say?. But it is hard to smile about such antics when, with my two-year-old daughter in my arms, my seven-year-old boy, staring at the noose, wonders if I can teach him to make such a knot.

It turns out I have more experience with a different kind of knot — the sort that history often presents. The year 2006 heralds not just yet another round of elections in our deeply divided nation, but also marks the centennial of the formal end to the Dreyfus Affair in France.

It was in the summer of 1906, twelve12 years after he was charged and found guilty of treason, that Captain Alfred Dreyfus finally cleared his name and reputation. Undoubtedly the most controversial event in the history of modern France, the Dreyfus Affair's lessons may have some relevance for our country today.

In 1894 Dreyfus, a captain with the French Army General Staff, was arrested for passing military secrets to the Germans. Tried by a military court martial, which permitted the use of hearsay evidence and held its proceedings in secret, Dreyfus was quickly pronounced guilty of treason. The prosecution offered just one piece of evidence: a single undated and unsigned

sheet of paper that, they claimed, was written by Dreyfus and passed to German officials. That he was Jewish also helped convict him, for there was the popular belief that Jews, no matter how assimilated, were still irremediably "foreign." Dreyfus was bundled off to Devil's Island, a lump of disease-ridden marsh and rocks off the coast of French Guyana, where he had been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement.

For the next four years, while Dreyfus suffered from isolation, heat and repeated bouts of malaria, his case won the attention of prominent republicans like Georges Clemenceau and Jean Jaurès. The famous novelist Emile Zola joined this movement of "Dreyfusards" who were convinced of Dreyfus' innocence and demanded a public retrial. In 1898, Zola published in a Parisian newspaper the incendiary editorial "J'Accuse," or "I Accuse," in which he revealed how the French court-martial had suppressed evidence supporting Dreyfus' innocence. Reminding France of its revolutionary heritage, Zola demanded an "explosion of truth and justice."

Explosion there was. By 1898, the affair had become the Affair. France, divided between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, was roiled by riots, protests, debates and even duels between family members and friends. The impressionist painters Pissarro and Sisley, both Dreyfusards, stopped talking to Renoir and Cézanne, who signed on with the anti-Dreyfusards, while Degas fired his favorite model because she was a Protestant and, as he blurted, "all Protestants are for Dreyfus." The world watched in awe as France tore itself apart over the guilt or innocence of a single man.

This remarkable civil war in France was over opposing visions of France. For the Dreyfusards, France, birthplace of the Enlightenment and Revolution, embodied the values of liberty, equality and fraternity. They insisted upon the use of reason and rejected the arbitrary actions of the state. Yet the anti-Dreyfusards had no less certain an idea of France: national interest trumped the claims of reason, the army's honor eclipsed the abstract ideal of justice, and patriotism was based on unquestioning faith, not critical debate. Not surprisingly, most anti-Dreyfusards were also deeply anti-Semitic: They saw the Jew as the embodiment of all the ills and dangers associated with the modern era.

The noose on our porch did not stir my fear of anti-Semitism: Our country remains blissfully free of this plague. Instead, it carried echoes of an earlier era when another country, France, with its own blue and red states, was no less polarized than our own. Like France at the end of the 19th century, our own cities and countryside, social classes and even religious denominations are sorely divided over the policies of our government. And like France, we are living in a time and place in which two sides, though issuing from citizens of the same nation, nevertheless seemed to inhabit different worlds.

Alfred Dreyfus, after having served more than four years of his life on Devil's Island, moved on with his own life. So, too, did France. Though the shadow cast by the affair was long, France's institutions and political leaders had the good sense and sense of history to unify rather than further inflame these tensions.

As I commemorate this anniversary, and replant our lawn sign, my deepest hope is that America will emerge from this bleak period of our own political history united and true to its original character.